27 November 2012

US Hurricane Intensity 1900-2012

The figure above comes courtesy Chris Landsea of the US National Hurricane Center. It shows the annual intensity of US landfalling hurricanes from 1900 to 2012. The figure updates a graph first published in Nature in 2005 ( Figure 2 here in PDF, details described there).

The red bars show the annual data. The grey straight line is the linear trend (no trend) and the black line shows the five-year average. The most recent five years have the lowest landfalling hurricane intensity of any five-year period back to 1900. By contrast 2004 and 2005 saw the most intense seasons of landfalling storms.

The data shown above includes both hurricanes and post-tropical cyclones which made landfall at hurricane strength (i.e., storms like Sandy). In addition to Sandy, there have been 3 other such storms to make landfall, in 1904, 1924 and 1925. The addition of the storms does not make a significant impact on the graph.